Seven Gothic Tales (46 page)

“In the relation between these two great passions of hers lay all her happiness. During the years of her triumphs it was perfect. Her voice and her art grew more wonderful every day. It was an
incredible thing. I myself do not hold that she had, at the time of her fall, reached the fulfillment of her possibilities. The world rang with her name. She held in her little hand the philosopher’s stone of music, which turned everything that she touched into gold. You, Sir,” he said, turning to me, “have told me how, in far countries, people wept at the remembrance of that deep river of gold, of those tall cascades of diamonds, sapphires, and pigeon-blood rubies. And she was adored by the people. They felt that as long as Pellegrina was singing to them, on the stage, the earth had not been abandoned by the angels.

“This, then—that Pellegrina should sing like an angel to her galleries, to melt their hearts and make them shed tears of heavenly joy, and to make them forget all the hardships of their existence, and remember the lost paradise; that she should scatter her soul over them, like a swarm of stars, and that they, on their side, should worship Pellegrina as a Madonna of their own, and the manifestation upon earth of God in his heaven, and to them all that was lovely, great, elegant, and brilliant—in this was her happiness.

“Even when she played, as I have told you, the village maidens of the opera, all in brocades and plumes, it was not from personal vanity either. It was as much from a feeling of duty to her galleries, just as the priests of your churches will deck out the image of the Virgin in the most elegant clothes that they can find. Within the pictures of the Nativity themselves, where all are moved by the sight of the Mother and child of God in the stables, on straw, and with a crib for a cradle, the priest cannot bear to see the Virgin poorly dressed, but adorns her in silks, and hangs gold chains on her.

“I myself smiled at this passion of hers for the poor, for to me the common people have always smelled badly, and I have no conviction of their virtue. ‘Oh, must we all be cut to the same pattern,’ she asked me then, ‘and be sinners worshiping the divinities?
Come, let me be what I am, Marcus, and choose to be. Let me be a divinity worshiping the sinners.’

“As to her lovers, I knew most of them, and they meant very little either to her or me. In fact, until she got used to them, they caused her more grief than pleasure.

“For she was ever in life, in spite of her excellent good sense, a Donna Quixotta de la Mancha. The phenomena of life were not great enough for her; they were not in proportion with her own heart. She was like a man who has been given an elephant gun and is asked to shoot little birds. Or like a great bird, an albatross, asked to hop and twitter with the little birds within an aviary. When she was hurt in her love affairs, it was not her vanity which was wounded. For outside of the stage she had none of it, and she knew well herself that the young men were not making love to the great soprano, but to the lovely woman of fashion, with eyes like two stars, and the grace of those gentle and wise gazelles of which a countryman of mine has written poems. On that account she took their shallowness and falsity lightly. But she was badly hurt and disappointed because the world was not a much greater place than it is, and because nothing more colossal, more like the dramas of the stage, took place in it, not even when she herself went into the show with all her might.

“She came back from these first love affairs of hers, when she was still a very young girl, even a little ashamed of herself. She would then, I think, have liked to become a man, and saw no sense in being a woman. For in all this splendor of woman’s beauty, the magnificence of bosom and limb, and radiance of eye, of lip, and flesh, she was like a lady who has put on her richest attire to meet the prince at a great ball, only to find that what she has been invited to is a homely gathering in honor of the police magistrate, at which everyday clothes are worn. Such ladies also feel a little ashamed, and drag their long trains and
rivières
of diamonds along with anger and bashfulness, feeling that they are likely, in this place, to put them to ridicule.

“I should think,” said the old Jew, “that many women, in their love affairs, must feel like that.

“In these hours of trouble she would turn to me, sure of my understanding. The world would have laughed at her, had it been at all possible for the vulgar and the unimaginative to recognize in one so beautiful and rich the traits of the knight of the woeful countenance. But I could not help laughing at her, as it was. I said to her: ‘To the world, and to your lovers as part of it, the whole doctrine of love, and in fact of all human intercourse, presents itself under the aspect of toxicology, the science of poisons and counterpoisons. They are all of them prepared for and adjusted to poisons. They are like little vipers or scorpions, proud of their bite, and proof against poison proportionate to their own virulence. To most of them love is a mutual distribution of poisons and counterpoisons, and in the course of a long career of love affairs they pride themselves on having become immune to all poisons, as natives of India are said to train themselves to become immune to the venom of all snakes. But you, Pellegrina, are no venomous snake, but a python. Very often, in your walk, you recall to me the dancing snakes which I was once shown by an Indian snake-charmer. But you have no poison whatever in you, and if you kill it is by the force of your embrace. This quality upsets your lovers, who are familiar with little vipers, and who have neither the strength to resist you, nor the wisdom to value the sort of death which they might obtain with you. And, in fact, the sight of you unfolding your great coils to revolve around, impress yourself upon, and finally crush a meadow mouse is enough to split one’s side with laughter.’ In this way I used to make her laugh, even through her tears.

“However, as she was so intelligent, and had been trained by my intelligence, it was she who learned from her lovers, and in the end these matters meant no more to her than to them. For this I owed the young men much thanks. For they had assisted her to achieve a lightness in such things which was not hers by birth.
From the time that she had taken their lessons to heart, she reached perfection, on the stage, in the part of the young innocent girl in love.”

“And this,” said Lincoln, interrupting the tale, “you will yourself know to be true, Mira. You remember the old immortal song of the young maiden who refuses all the gifts of the Sultan to be true to her lover, which begins:
Ah Rupia, kama na Majasee
. It is a very lovely song about true and pure love. Only a whore has ever sung it well, that I know of.”

He then returned to the story told by the old Jew:

“Thus did we live,” the old Jew went on, “in the white villa of Milan, until the day of her disaster.

“Young men, you remember your fathers weeping over this Tuesday. It happened during a performance of
Don Giovanni
, in the second act, where Donna Anna comes on the stage, with Ottavio’s letter in her hand, and begins the recitative:
Crudele? Ah nò, mio bene! Troppo mi spiace allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr’ alma desia
. Just as Pellegrina entered, two or three bits of flaming wood fell down from the ceiling in front of her. She had a brave heart; she just steadily went on, gazing up a little only, taking the high note as easily as she breathed. But a whole burning beam followed, and the entire theater rose up in a panic, the orchestra stopping in the middle of a measure. People rushed to the doors, and women fainted. Pellegrina took a step back and looked around until her eyes met mine, where I sat in the front row of the parquet. Yes, she looked for me in that moment of despair. And have I no cause to be proud? She was not at all frightened. She stood there quite calm, as if she meant to say: ‘Here we are to die together now, you and I, Marcus.’ But I, I was afraid. I dared not force my way up onto that flaming stage, where all the trees, and the houses of the streets, were cardboard only. At that same moment, as a great cloud of smoke wafted out from the one wing of the stage to the other, and the heat struck out like the breath of a great furnace, she was hidden from my
eyes. I ran along with the crowd and got out somehow, and in the street, which was like a madhouse, the cold air met me again. My servant, who had been waiting for me in the hall, held me up. We were informed then that Pellegrina had been saved by the man who sang the part of Leporelle, and whom she had helped in his career. He had carried her with him all through the burning wing, and down the stairs, her hair and her clothes all aflame. The people, when they heard that she was saved, fell on their knees.

“I brought her to her house, and collected the doctors of Milan around her, and she lived. She had been struck by a falling beam, and had a deep burn, where the smoldering wood had hit her, from the ear to the collar bone. Otherwise her burns were not deep. She recovered from them quickly. But it was found that from the shock she had lost her voice. She would never sing one note again.

“When I think of her as she was this first week after her loss, it seems to me that she had in reality been burned up, and was lying on her side in the bed, immovable, black and charred like those bodies which they have dug up from the burned town of Pompeii. I sat with her for six days, and she did not speak a word. And it seemed to me the most cruel thing amongst them all that the grief of Pellegrina Leoni should be dumb.

“I did not speak to her, either. The carriages of all the world drove up and turned on the paved terrace outside her room, asking for news of her.

“I sat in the darkened room and thought of the case. This to her is, I thought, like what it would be to the priest to find the miracle-working image of the Virgin, which he has served, only a profane, an obscene, pagan idol, hollow and gnawed by rats. Like what it would be to the wife to find her heroic husband no hero, but a lunatic or a clown.

“No, I thought again, it is not like that. I knew the distress to which hers might be compared. The distress of the royal bride, who goes, with a kingdom for her dowry, adorned with the treasures
of her father’s house, her young bridegroom, a king’s son, waiting for her, the city decorated for her welcome, and ringing with cymbals and songs of maidens and youths, and who is ravished by robbers on her way. Yes, it was like that, I thought.

“None of the great people arriving from all parts of the world to inquire about her ever obtained access to her house. From that fact grew the rumor that she lay dying. What would they have said had she let them come in, I wondered. That she was still young and beautiful, and beloved by them all?

“What would those people, I thought, have said to the ravished royal virgin to comfort her? That she was young and lovely still, and that her bridegroom would cherish her? They might have told her that she had no fault, and had done nothing wrong: ‘There is no sin in her worthy of death, for he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.’ But the consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and the servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.

“You must excuse me, gentlemen, if I am talking of things too wonderful for you, things which you understand not. For where do your women keep their honor, in these modern times? Do they know the word even, when they hear it?

“That I did not speak one word of comfort to her, and that no word in the world could have comforted me myself, this made my presence bearable to Pellegrina during this week of ours.

“She grieved for her great name, and the applause of the courts, and for the homage of princes, as that ravished royal virgin would have wept over her splendor, her bridal crown, and the balls and pageants of the wedding festivities. But at the thought of her galleries she wept such tears as the bride would have wept for her royal bridegroom. For how were they to bear the loss of Pellegrina
Leoni? Were they, from now, to live on, day after day, going to their hard work, oppressed and wronged by their masters and the authorities, ill paid, and the heavens never open to them again? And no Madonna in the skies to smile on them? Their one star had fallen; they were left in the dark of the night—the galleries which had laughed and wept with her.

“During that week I learned what a difference there may be, in the length of twenty-four hours, between one month and the next. Here at our house time used to fly lightly, like a May breeze, like butterflies, like a summer shower and rainbow. Now the day was long as a year; the night, as ten years.

“After that first week, Pellegrina asked me to give her some strong poison, with which to shorten her time for good. I had been in the habit, as a young man, of carrying such stuff with me, in case life should become unbearable to me. I was at this time living in Milan, and I used to drive out to her house every day. I handed her the poison at noon on a Wednesday, and she asked me to come back the next afternoon.

“When I came, I found her still very ill. She told me that she had taken the full dose of opium, which I had given her, but that it had had no effect. She could not die. This, although she believed it herself, I know was not the truth. What I had given her could not have failed to kill any human being. She may have taken enough to be ill, perhaps unconscious, and she thought that she had taken it all. Still, this makes no difference. The truth was that, as she had said, she could not die. In one way or another she had too much life in her.

“Afterward I thought that had I at the time killed myself, she might have had the strength to follow me. From what she had said to me from time to time I have it that she had always dreaded death, as a thing too foreign to her nature, and that it had been a comfort to her to think that I, being so much older than she, would be likely to die before she did, and to prepare the way for her, or to receive her in the other world, did such a world exist.
That was one of the reasons why she preferred me to younger and stronger men. But at the time I did not think of that.